Monitoring neurological activity to detect epileptic seizures: Key Neurotech Patent #9

– Illus­tra­tive image from U.S. Patent No. 6,473,639

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Today we are shar­ing a 2002 patent assigned to Neu­ropace, Inc. (As men­tioned, we are fea­tur­ing a foun­da­tion­al Per­va­sive Neu­rotech patent a day, from old­er to new­er by issue date)

U.S. Patent No. 6,473,639: Neu­ro­log­i­cal event detec­tion pro­ce­dure using processed dis­play chan­nel based algo­rithms and devices incor­po­rat­ing these procedures.

• Assignee(s): Neu­ropace, Inc.
• Inventor(s): David R. Fis­chell, Jonathan Har­wood, Ben­jamin D. Pless
• Tech­nol­o­gy Cat­e­go­ry: Neuro-monitoring
• Issue Date: Octo­ber 29, 2002

SharpBrains’ Take:

The ‘639 patent dis­clos­es tech­niques for detect­ing neu­ro­log­i­cal activ­i­ty, name­ly the occur­rence of an epilep­tic seizure based on algo­rith­mic pro­cess­ing of sig­nals mea­sur­ing brain activ­i­ty. More specif­i­cal­ly, the sys­tem dis­cerns neu­ro­log­i­cal activ­i­ty by con­sid­er­ing brain sig­nal activ­i­ty based on the loca­tion of placed elec­trodes from which brain sig­nals orig­i­nat­ed, para­me­ters used in pro­cess­ing the sig­nal and a para­me­ters for detect­ing the even­t’s occur­rence that are unique to the patient. Despite some implantable embod­i­ment and claims that might appear to have a high word count, the scope of many claims (e.g., inde­pen­dent claims 1 and 36) have broad cov­er­age over non-inva­sive and cus­tomiz­able elec­trode-based detec­tion of neu­ro­log­i­cal activ­i­ty. The broad claim scope, cou­pled with the appli­ca­tion’s near­ly 200 for­ward cita­tions, make the ‘639 patent a key non-inva­sive neu­rotech­nol­o­gy patent.

Abstract:

This inven­tion relates gen­er­al­ly to infor­ma­tion pro­cess­ing tech­niques used in the treat­ment of epilep­sy and to devices for using these techniques.

Illus­tra­tive Claim 1. A device for detec­tion of neu­ro­log­i­cal event activ­i­ty in a patien­t’s brain comprising:

• at least one brain elec­trode con­fig­ured to mon­i­tor brain elec­tri­cal sig­nals and pro­duce an out­put, each said brain elec­trode being posi­tion­able to a posi­tion rel­a­tive to a patien­t’s brain,
• at least one processed dis­play chan­nel proces­sor con­fig­ured to pro­duce at least one processed dis­play chan­nel, said at least one processed dis­play chan­nel being a sig­nal pro­duced by sig­nal pro­cess­ing by said at least one processed dis­play chan­nel proces­sor, of a dig­i­tal sig­nal relat­ed to said out­put from said at least one brain elec­trode, the sig­nal pro­cess­ing hav­ing one or more parameters;
• a neu­ro­log­i­cal event detec­tor con­fig­ured to process the at least one processed dis­play chan­nel with at least one detec­tor algo­rithm to detect neu­ro­log­i­cal event activ­i­ty based upon 
  • i.) the brain elec­tri­cal sig­nals received by the at least one brain electrode,
  • ii.) the posi­tion of each brain electrode,
  • iii.) the para­me­ters of the sig­nal pro­cess­ing used to cre­ate the at least one processed dis­play channel,
  • iv.) and at least one detec­tor algo­rithms hav­ing at least one detec­tor para­me­ter cus­tomize­able for each patient.

To learn more about mar­ket data, trends and lead­ing com­pa­nies in the dig­i­tal brain health space –dig­i­tal plat­forms for brain/ cog­ni­tive assess­ment, mon­i­tor­ing and enhance­ment– check out this mar­ket report. To learn more about our analy­sis of 10,000+ patent fil­ings, check out this IP & inno­va­tion neu­rotech report.